NEW YORK – The first line of one of the oldest poems in Western literature, Homer’s “Iliad,” begins with the ancient Greek word for anger, or superanger: wrath. And from that emotion an entire epic driven by hatred, hubris, lust, grief and violence spins out.
The poem dates from around 700 B.C., a wild and woolly time, no doubt. Leap ahead four centuries and things have changed in Greece. The calm of reason has descended; emotions are under control. Or so we’re inclined to imagine from looking at the buff Apollos and poised Aphrodites of the Classical Age.
But we’re wrong. Explosive feelings, personal and political, were still the story of Greek culture then. Such feelings continue to fuel and inflame modern societies at least nominally descended from that culture, the United States being one. And these feelings are now the subject of a strange and wonderful exhibition, “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.-200 A.D.,” at the Onassis Cultural Center New York in Midtown.
The Onassis Cultural Center itself tends to stir an emotion: gratitude. It’s some kind of gift outright. Tucked away below street level in Olympic Tower — you have to know it’s there to find it — and charging no admission, it brings in top-shelf art from Greece, supplemented by choice international loans. The current show draws on the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Acropolis Museum and Greek regional museums, as well as the Louvre, the British Museum and the Met.
The results aren’t necessarily full-fledged “masterpiece” shows. This one isn’t. It’s a mix. There are true glam items — an apparitionally perfect marble kouros; a cup attributed to the great Penthesilea Painter — but also homely ones: pottery shards with inscriptions, that kind of thing. It’s what the show does with the material that really counts: It uses objects to tell a human story, one that changes our view of the past, brings it into the present; makes it ours. This is precisely what an object-rich museum like the Met could be doing with its undervisited permanent collections, but rarely does.
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